ABSTRACT
After the relative prominence of multicultural citizenship theoretical debates and multicultural policy developments in the 1990s, we witness today a change of direction. This crisis of multiculturalism comes at a time of heightened security awareness as a result of the events of New York (9/11, 2001), Madrid (14/3, 2004) and most recently in London (7/7 and 21/7, 2005). European citizenship is disorientated, increasingly linking a religion (Islam) with violence and anti-Western values. The upsurge of international terrorism has led to the increasing securitization of migration agendas. Even though suspected terrorists are apparently to be found among the educated, middle-class, legal immigrants – the ‘good’ kind of immigrants for whom Western societies and economies have been competing in the past decade – the argument of terrorism is now used in the policy debate to justify tougher controls of migration in general. In this context of high security awareness, existing models and policies of immigrant integration and the accommodation of (Muslim) minority claims are questioned. The governments of several ‘old’ immigration hosts like the Netherlands, Britain or France are tempted to adopt assimilationist approaches to counteract what they perceive as a (relative) failure of their former multicultural policies. New hosts like Greece, Spain or Italy and ‘old’ hosts that did not consider themselves as such (for example, Germany) find it even harder to adopt a multicultural approach even if political elites recognize the need to integrate immigrants.
